The British Museum

On Saturday after lunch at the Italian cafe we headed down the road to the British Museum. The museum is probably the most ironic in the world because inside you will find nothing to do with Britain per se. What the Museum should really be called is the Absolutely Anything that is not British Museum as it reads as a scrapbook of colonial British conquest and plunder across the world.  Inside there are thousands of historic items from Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Chinese, Polynesian (plus a few hundred other cultures) history. The Museum itself is absolutely huge with three wings and a central public atrium joining them all together. Each wing is devoted to a particular geographic/historic region. It is pretty amazing to wander through 8,000 years of human history seeing everything from early African tools to the most complex of Roman carvings.

Roman copies of Greek stone heads depicting a few very wise men

Emma was particularly excited about the Rosetta Stone (below, top left image). For those like myself who did not know what it was its a big template with inscriptions of the same piece of information in three languages (Greek and two Egyptian scripts I think). This archaeological find has helped historians more than anything else decode the mysteries of hieroglyphics and unlock the secrets of the ancient Egyptian world.

Click images to enlarge

We were there for quite a while but just like Disneyland the British Museum is something you cannot do in a day. No doubt in the course of our stay here we will visit numerous times to checkout the various exhibitions and public lectures. There is an exhibition of Japanese swords and a public lecture on ancient architecture coming up that both sound very good.